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Walking Over the US Constitution – California’s New Privacy Law

You’ve probably been hearing about a bunch of new privacy laws coming out of California.  We’ve been warning you about the bills all year and now they’ve become law.

Aside from being bad ideas and costing consumers more than protecting them, one of these new laws, SB 568, is patently unconstitutional.

We’ve talked before about the importance of Section 230 and how it shields a website from content posted by a third-party.  Section 230 made possible the user-generated content side of the internet by removing liability from sites for the content posted by their users.

The end result is an unconstitutional law that imposes new liability on e-commerce sites.

Well SB 568 violates this federal law by making e-commerce sites liable for ads posted by users.

Take, for example, eBay.  eBay allows users to post ads and sell things like spray-paint.  But under SB 568, eBay could be breaking the law if a 17 year-old Californian saw this eBay listing.

Under SB 568, sites can’t allow a third-party to show a known 17 year-old ads for spray-paint or tanning salons.  But what happens when it’s a classified ad?  Well SB 568 says that’s a problem too.

This is the very thing that Section 230 was designed to prevent.

The end result is an unconstitutional law that imposes new liability on e-commerce sites.

NetChoice will fight this unconstitutional law and work to prevent other states from making laws based on the same bad idea.